Homestead
BDN’s Homestead section is a celebration of rural life. Our writers cover small farms, animals, DIY solutions and fascinating Maine people who find unique ways to live simply. Read more Homestead stories here.
Twenty-five years ago, Mattie Bamman swore he’d never come back to Maine.
He said so recently from the living room of his homestead in Northport, whose windows overlook the raised garden beds, small hoop house, shed and compost pile he built when he returned to a life he didn’t think he wanted.
Growing up in the Down East fishing village of Milbridge, he was a child of Maine’s original back-to-the-land community. Bamman watched the movement mature, and his own relationship to it changed as he grew. When he returned from the opposite coast to go back to the land himself, he had their experiences to learn from, and his own values to learn how to live by.
His experience demonstrates the staying power the movement had in Maine, where its legacy continues to draw homesteaders new and old to the state.
Sustaining an ideal-driven lifestyle was a challenge for the young people who came to Maine seeking better lives in the 1960s and 1970s, and it could be complicated for their children too, according to the 2014 book “Get Back Stay Back: Second Generation Back-to-the-Landers” by Joseph Conway.
“Feasibility would be the issue that would define the movement,” he wrote in its introduction.
For the Bamman family, the journey began in the early 1970s, when Don Bamman and Barbara Bland left the New York barn they were living in and headed east. They were politically discontented and inspired to lead “the good life” described in the writing of Helen and Scott Nearing. Don Bamman wanted to be a boatbuilder, so they chose Maine.
They stopped in Harrington at the sight of a bakery advertising whole wheat bread, a rarity at the time and a sign of the likeminded people they found there. The couple’s core values were living sustainably, caring for the earth, joining a community and being as self-sufficient as possible, they said.
The two bought 40 acres in nearby Milbridge, built a small house by hand, grew a large garden and made ends meet with the available local jobs, from raking blueberries to clamming to hanging seaweed to harvesting elvers.
Don Bamman and a friend built a schooner, the Janet May, from trees they cut and launched it in Milbridge. The family added to the house, installed running water and raised two children on a road surrounded by other back-to-the-landers.
For Mattie Bamman, it was an idyllic early childhood.
Young friends lived nearby; neighbors taught him painting, pottery and Zen Buddhist meditation. Another started a school in a geodesic dome. Poet Theodore Enslin employed Bamman stacking wood, introduced him to poetry and became a mentor.
Life Down East also taught him to be resourceful, take risks and pay attention to nature.
Adolescence was more complicated. His parents felt welcomed by older locals in a state that had been losing population for decades, but some were a little suspicious of the “hippies,” his mother, Barbara Bland, said.
Their son was teased at school for being sensitive and having long hair. The opioid epidemic was ramping up; rural poverty felt crushing. He was also questioning whether the values he shared with his family were possible to live by in the larger world, and if doing so made a difference.
The family moved to Ellsworth to send their kids to high school, where he was further disappointed that people didn’t live by the basic environmental and pacifist principles that defined his life.
His parents had the philosophy that you can only control yourself, but for their son, that wasn’t enough. He graduated early to get out of Maine faster and swore that was it.
“I was like, well, I don’t think I’m gonna solve any of these problems,” he said. “I’m just gonna go live my life on my own, on its own terms, and thus took off and became a culinary travel writer, because I just wanted to see how far I could push it.”
He ended up in college in New York, played in a death metal band, wrote poetry in San Francisco and went to Italy with his now-wife Kristin, where his food and travel blog took off and grew into a career.
But he always felt uncomfortable in cities and knew he’d return to nature one day, he said.
By 2018 the couple was living in Portland, Oregon, packed among other people in rented apartments, doing intangible work on computers and ready to settle down.
Bamman also realized he wasn’t living by his values; he worried about contributing to climate change by promoting travel and expensive meals.
“Climate change is this great catchall for all of the systems that civilization, Western civilization, works off of that are totally suicidal — people making choices that are gonna harm their children and their children’s children,” he said.
In 2018, the couple found a house in Northport on a former golf course. The topsoil was gone and the woods were full of debris. Caring for these 10 acres was a way to care for the Earth at a small scale. It was also a site for a second-generation back-to-the-land experiment to see if what he learned in childhood could provide a livelihood.
They soon found they needed to scale back their plans if they were going to keep it up.
Bamman found decision-making help from another Maine homesteader of a generation past, the late Bill Coperthwaite, who wrote about living according to one’s beliefs in simple and beautiful ways.
He’s come to look at homesteading similarly to his parents: he can’t stop the systems he disagrees with, but he can try to stop participating. Growing healthy, ethical food, saving seeds and making compost are ways to do that, and also give people agency and empowerment, he said.
The couple doesn’t have children, but Bamman sees other opportunities to pass down knowledge. By day, he’s now a poet, freelance grant writer and communications coordinator for local food nonprofit Waldo County Bounty.
Bamman is also writing a literary mystery novel about back-to-the-landers in the 1970s. It begins with a suburban New Yorker living in a van Down East, then unravels how he got there.
It was inspired by his childhood community in Milbridge, where some people are still homesteading today. These original back-to-the-landers told him to write a book so others could understand what they did and why they did it.
For Bamman, a major lesson is to let go and adjust to reality.
“You’ve got to make sure that you’re happy and not overextending yourself based on some idea,” he said. “Ideas are fine, but the actual work is what matters, and doing that in a way that’s good for your body and your mind.”
His parents agree. They now live in Lamoine, and though selling their homestead was painful, they’ve lost their enthusiasm for farm labor with age. Their lifestyle has changed, but they say their values haven’t. Both are happy their children returned to Maine and came “back to the land” as adults.
“You have the values from childhood, and if they’re good ones, you keep them,” Bland said. “Maybe then you add onto them.”
